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Snail in coffin of couple's Spanish dream Aug 21 2005 Binning their jobs and the Welsh weather, they relocated to the Costa del Sol to follow their gastronomic dream. While they failed to find a suitable place to live, they found the perfect spot to set up a snail farm to breed their very own molluscs. All in the southern Spanish garden should have been rosy - except the not-so-slow-coach snails did a runner! Lee, from Newport, and Cheryl, from Cardiff, were the unlikely stars of Channel 4's A Place in Spain last year when despairing viewers watched as they spent three-and-a-half years unsuccessfully trawling the property market from Benidorm to Gibraltar. Revisiting them for next month's follow-up show, programme makers hoped there would be a happy ending. Instead, the couple tell how they had been forced to make the heartbreaking decision to leave their beloved snails in the care of a friendly estate agent to return to Wales because they still couldn't find a suitable house in Spain. And the cameras capture the soul-destroying moment they go back to check on their business to find the snails have given them the slip and legged it. Luckily for them, they hadn't put all their eggs in one basket - while they were home they also invested in a trout fishery in North Wales. So the couple ditch the snails for good to pursue a third career, selling mobile homes in the Spanish countryside. When that doesn't work out, they plan to develop a caravan park and swap their fishery for an old Spanish farmhouse - but again, that idea falls flat on its face. The episode shows Lee falling out with the fishery caretaking manager and deciding to put the whole place up for sale, setting Spanish estate agent Julio the unenviable task of finding them a decent place to stay. Of course, there's a last-minute hitch on the sale of the fishery and when they do finally make it to Spain, tempers are running high. A spokesman said: "After the initial rose-tinted daydreams have passed we get down to the nitty gritty of money, time, red tape and relationships. "It's a warning to any would-be business people that moving out to Spain to start a new life might not be as idyllic as it sounds." Return to Benalmadena:Lifestyle Return to Benalmadena:Work |
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